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Considering Immigration Disrupts Children's Essentialist Beliefs about National Identity
Children think of national identity as a core part of identity: previous research finds that children are more likely to expect people from the same country to share preferences than people of the same gender (Hussak & Cimpian, 2019). However, do children truly believe that where someone is born defines them in important (and unchanging) ways? In the present set of studies, we extend the study by Hussak and Cimpian (2019) by including targets who are immigrants. In Study 1, we find that children believe that national identity is less stable when considering immigrants compared to nonimmigrants and are willing to state that an individual could maintain two national identities. In Study 2, we replicate past work on an inductive potential task that contrasts national identity with gender when reasoning about nonimmigrants: children were more likely to generalize preferences based on shared national identity than shared gender. When considering immigrants, however, children’s responses were more mixed. Children relied on gender when the gender-match also lived in the same country that the immigrant target moved to, but were at chance when having to choose between a gender-match who lived in the immigrant’s heritage country compared to a non-gender match living in the host country. Thus, rather than essentializing national identity, children may care more about where one lives than where they were born when generalizing preferences. These findings suggest that children expect immigrants to assimilate to and adopt the preferences of their new culture
The crude ostracism detection system: Pupils react to minimal cues of exclusion
When people are rejected by others, they typically feel an immediate sense of pain—referred to as social pain. Social pain is hypothesized to be the alarm response of a “quick and crude” ostracism detection system, a system that is highly sensitive to even minimal signs of exclusion. Physiological reactivity has been found to accompany this social pain, but it is unclear whether the physiological mechanism underlying the ostracism detection system is also “quick and crude.” To test whether physiological reactivity to exclusion is “quick and crude,” the present study investigated whether pupil dilation (an index of physiological reactivity) differs when detecting exclusion from human entities versus nonhuman entities and when experiencing versus witnessing exclusion using a Cyberball paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that pupil size decreased less when viewing players who were exclusive than those who were inclusive, regardless of whether the players were human (i.e., undergraduate students) or nonhuman (i.e., computerized) entities. The same pupil reactivity pattern was observed in Experiment 2 after participants watched interactions in which another person was included or excluded by human or nonhuman entities. In Experiment 3, participating in real-life interactions with human players did not cause pupil reactivity to be greater to human players compared to nonhuman players, but pupil size again decreased less when viewing exclusive players compared to inclusive players. Across all three experiments, pupil size decreased less when viewing players who were exclusive than inclusive regardless of the social identity of the players. These findings support the idea of a highly sensitive, “quick and crude” physiological mechanism that underlies the ostracism detection system. 11Nssciscopu